VHorns Extended Brass

Vibrato is controlled with the left dial on the front panel of the interface.

Immediately below the dial is a small menu with 3 options:

1- Auto: this enables automatic vibrato and the dial will simply control how much vibrato is added to the sound.

2- Auto time: This is similar to Auto mode, but a time envelope will control the amount of vibrato. You can edit this envelope in the preferences by clicking on "edit auto vib". This opens a small panel that displays a table to let you control the duration and intensity of the vibrato. 

3- Manual: This is for advanced use and conrol over vibrato. In reality, a trumpet player changes the shape or position of their mouth on the mouthpiece to change the pitch up and down. In this mode, the neutral position (with no pitch change) is the middle value of the dial and a value of 0.5 (and CC at value 64). Values below 0.5 will result in a lower pitch and values above 0.5 will result in a higher pitch. This is very useful for creating vibrato that doesn't have a fixed speed.

As mentioned earlier, there is a fourth way to create vibrato, using only the air flow control. The "allow vibrato with air flow" setting has to be set to ‘yes' in the preferences and you then need to perform a fast up and down variation in whichever controller you use for the air flow.

In the preferences, you have options to customize the vibrato even further to control vibrato (these options affect all 4 modes above).

1- There is a small dial that controls the overall amount of vibrato. This can be set to some very high values that will sound very unnatural to some, but that is necessary for using some dedicated wind controllers that have a narrow CC range.

2- You can change the amount of volume modulation: vibrato isn't just a change in pitch, it's also timbre and volume changes; you can control how much of this you want here.

3- You can change the amount of timbre modulation to add even more realism

4- You can of course change the amount of pitch modulation as well.

5- And you can change the vibrato speed - this now goes up to 115%.

In the bottom right corner of the vibrato section is a dial to adjust the humanization/randomization of the undulations. The higher this dial, the more uneven the vibrato will be.

Some controllers like the EWI use the pitch bend as the vibrato source, so we added the P. Bend option to the bottom of the CC list in case you want to use it for the vibrato and not bends.

When you play a legato on the keyboard (when you overlap two notes), our engine will automatically stop the first note and play a legato instead of a normal sustain.

This is exactly what happens on a real brass instrument when the air flow is continuous while the player changes the note. There are a number of ways to play these legatos and we gave you access to everything so that they can be controlled in real time.

By default, the legatos are set to Real, which is transitions built from real recordings of transitions, but if you prefer a more artifical sound, we also created fully-Modeled transitions. A third option, Smart transitions, prevents any joins between notes that would be near-impossible to play smoothly in real life.

1- Velocity to attack / sustains : This controls the way new sustained notes are played, for example if the air flow is at a CC value of 75 and you play a note at velocity 20, our engine will ramp the air flow from 20 to 75 and thus create a quick volume raise. And vice versa - if the velocity is above the air flow value, it will create a quick attack. The duration of this ramp is controlled by the velocity to attack time value.

2- Velocity to attack / legatos : This controls how legato notes are played, and the procedure is identical to that for sustains, but for legatos it covers the joins between different notes rather than sustained notes on their own. This feature is very useful on woodwind instruments as many players play legato notes with a slight crescendo between notes, so to replicate this, all you need to do is play every new legato note at a low velocity.

3- Velocity to attack time : The speed at which a note changes from the velocity value to the airflow value

4- Velocity to attack sharpness : The sharpness of the attacks, or, in more detail, control over the shape of the curve joining the velocity value to the value of the airflow.

Glides are often associated with brass instruments, and so we wanted to include them as an option, triggered by a number of different methods listed below.

1- Mode: velocity. In this mode, any velocity below the threshold value will trigger a glide and its duration will depend on how low the velocity is. For example if the velocity is at 20, it will be a fast glide (comparable to a legato time), but a velocity of 1 will trigger a slow glide at the duration of the max length value you set.

2- Mode: CC. In this mode, you can control the glide duration with a MIDI CC, again it will go from the Max length value when the CC is at value 1 to standard short legatos when the CC is set to value 120 and above.

3- Mode: Manual. In this mode, the glide value is fixed and the glide speed can go from 50ms to 500ms. We added a randomize time value to give it a natural feel, but bear in mind that when increasing the randomize value, the engine can technically receive a value below 50ms in which case it will play a slow legato.

4- In addition to these, you can glide using the pitch bend, and the max pitch bend value will determine the bend range. The quality of that bend will depend on the "use advanced pitch bend value". Keep in mind that that using this option will take up more CPU, even when you’re not actually playing pitch bends.

When a brass player plays any note, if they are very precise, they will directly land almost exactly on the correct pitch and create a very precise attack, but it is often also "missed" on purpose and a quick flutter attack then happens. You can use the Transition flutter value to control how much of this you want. Right click on this slider (just like for any other slider) to choose to control it with a MIDI CC or a host automation.

Another very important aspect of legatos is what happens during the transition itself. On a trombone, there are no valves, so the transition is just air change. On valve instruments, however, there is something called half-valve which happens while the valve is being pressed. This effect can be noticed on two occasions: while playing gliding legatos or when using the pitch bend. You can control how much of that effect you want for each situation.

Like every other control, each mute can be assigned its own control, allowing for changes between mutes without having to go into the interface every time.

The plunger mute offers continous control over its application - this is set to CC93 by default but this can be changed in the usual way.

Continuous control over the plunger mute offers users the option to recreate the 'wah-wah' effect, and we suggest trying it in combination with the growl/flutter dial for even more color.

At the top, you will see a tuning button which opens a panel allowing you to tune each note to your liking. This is very useful for performing music not written for standard tuning systems, or for music that doesn’t use traditional Western classical scales.

1- The max glide interval controls the maximum interval that you are able to create a continuous glide between. On a trombone for example, the maximum possible glide is from position 7 to position 1, so 6 semitones. We allow for more than 6, but to play something natural, it's better to lower that value as in reality most players will glide a maximum of 3 or 4 semitones and "cheat" the rest. Above that value, our engine will "cheat" as well and skip some notes while still ending up on the target note.

2- The note pitch imprecision is exactly what it says - it will make the notes sound very slightly out of tune, completely at random, between 0 and the value you set. A value of 100% will randomize +/-1 semitone.

3- The attack pitch variation is a bit different, it is technically a fast bend ramp that is almost always present in live performances. It is more or less super-human to play every single note perfectly in tune from the first attack, so in order to create a more realistic sound, this is set slightly above 0 by default. Increasing the value will control how much bend you want (in other words; how far away the sound will be from the note you’re playing) and the attack pitch variation time will decide how quick that ramp is.

The direction of the variation can be controlled by selecting the option from the menu next to the dial (Natural, Up, Down), and the small button immediately next to this enables a velocity-controlled attack, meaning that the higher the velocity, the more the effect will be heard.

Use Advanced Pitch Bend activates our APB engine, allowing for more realism in the pitch bends. This can be disabled to save on CPU.

Max Pitch Bend controls the possible range of the pitch bends.

And if you need pitch bends for the full range of the instrument, we included the option to Use MPE as well, but this comes at the expense of realism.